Opinion

Half a lifetime ago, I was the youthful editor of another hi-fi magazine in the UK. One day in 1979, I was visited by a senior executive from Goodmans, who explained that the firm’s next hi-fi speaker range would not be built in its own British factory, but would be bought in from Jamo of Denmark. It was a sign of the times for the company which, in the 1950s, had been ‘Europe’s largest Manufacturer and the World’s largest Exporters of High Fidelity Loudspeakers’.

Like Celestion and Tannoy, Goodmans got started in the mid-1920s. Founder Edward Stanley Newland began by reconditioning ex-army headphones, using the premises of an early business partner – a Mr Goodman. The company eventually expanded and a factory in Wembley was opened in 1936.

In World War Two, Goodmans produced thousands of headphone sets, as well as every kind of loudspeaker driver. One unusual design was the 10in Axiom 80, intended for use in a closed box. The cone had no surround but was supported by flexible arms, giving a very low fundamental resonance of about 17Hz. Today, original Axiom 80 drivers are prized by vintage-minded full-range horn fanatics.

More innovations followed, with Ted Jordan responsible for many of them, including the Axiette driver with its parabolic cone, along with the Maxim bookshelf speaker, his final concept before leaving in 1963. A young Laurie Fincham (audio engineer by day, bass player in a modern jazz group by night) helped develop the Maxim design. He soon left to join Celestion, then went on to work for KEF, becoming perhaps the UK’s best-known loudspeaker designer.

In the late 1960s the Audio Suite followed Goodman’s little Maxim speaker and presaged Sony’s upright miniature 88 components [HFN Apr ’12]

When the Maxim appeared in 1964, it was slightly larger than Jordan’s earliest prototype and had become a two-way speaker with a 2.75in paper cone bass driver. Goodmans then created the Audio Suite, with its vertical-format ’bookshelf’ Maxamp amplifier and Stereomax tuner that anticipated Sony’s later ‘88’ series.

In 1970, Goodmans’ technical director Peter Collings Wells hired another gifted engineer who also played music, when the late Billy Woodman arrived from Australia. Woodman developed the Axent soft-dome tweeter and introduced the idea of edge-wound voice-coils to increase power handling. By 1974 he had conceived his idea for a high-quality 3in dome midrange unit and left to establish speaker maker ATC.

Andy Whittle, later to spend many happy years with Rogers, joined in 1985. Goodmans had a BBC licence to manufacture the LS3/5A, but wanted a cheaper mini-monitor to revive the Maxim name, so Whittle designed the Maxim II.

Mr Newland had died in 1955, leading to successive changes of ownership. In 1963 there was a takeover by Radio Rentals, which then merged with Thorn’s TV rental arm DER, and in 1968 the renamed Goodmans Loudspeakers became part of the Thorn group.

In 1971 came the move from Wembley to Havant on the UK’s south coast, where a new 140,000 square feet factory was built alongside an existing one to form a new complex employing about 850 people. Then in 1986, Goodmans merged with Tannoy to form the TGI group, which also included Mordaunt Short.

By this time Goodmans’ hi-fi output was dwarfed by its commercial speaker production, supplying vast quantities of drive units to car makers. And so the decision was taken to sell the Goodmans brand name to a group specialising in low-cost consumer electronics, while continuing the loudspeaker OEM business under the name GLL.

As the current brand owners blandly state, ‘For decades Goodmans has stood for wide access to enjoyable products’. And sadly, although it’s certainly true that ‘Goodmans is a familiar name to British consumers’, very few of those consumers would now connect the brand with ‘real hi-fi’, and the work of Newland, Jordan, Fincham, Woodman, et al.